For more than 25 years, Plaza Latina has been a fixture in the heart of South Omaha, offering various retail and service businesses to the community. Trust is a commodity here, as non-English speakers communicate in their native tongue, eliminating the fear some have of being cheated for lack of language.
The winter months are, year in and year out, the slowest of all, but so far in 2025, Tony Vega, who opened Plaza Latina in 1999, has felt a sharper-than-normal chill in the air. This year, the already-reduced crowds have further thinned dramatically, and sales are off because of it. It is an expression of the nervousness many in the community feel, given what’s playing out with federal immigration officials in cities coast to coast.
“At least 50%, you know, is the decrease,” Vega said through an interpreter. “Some of the small business owners say that because of the situation, they’re struggling financially right now, and they even start thinking about withdrawal from the business because of that lack of traffic.”
In late January, the Trump administration announced and implemented a new focus on locating and arresting individuals who are in the country illegally. It set off shock waves that reverberated in ethnically heavy communities, both those affected directly as well as those such as South Omaha, where coordinated action has yet to take place.
The impact is already being felt in segments of the business community, as illustrated in Plaza Latina, a microcosm of what might come city-wide if or when federal authorities reach Omaha, not only for the loss of those individuals as employees, but as consumers as well.
“Before the political issue was put in place, right, the traffic was just normal traffic,” said Marco A. Cervantes, who owns a financial planning business. “After it was on the news and everywhere in the nation about mass deportation, you know, several places and this, this, and that, the fear of people coming down to the South Omaha businesses, it’s just so great. The fear of thinking that (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is going to be in South Omaha, it’s going to be in the surrounding areas creating, you know, deportations, that adds to a lack of business.”
From any vantage point, the potential impact of the new effort is a slippery thing to get ahold of even for something as fundamental as pinning down accurate numbers. A commonly held estimate states about 11 million undocumented U.S. citizens, or 22% of the overall immigrant population, resided in the country in 2022, per the Pew Research Center, which also suggested about 8.3 million of those individuals were in the workforce. But as both numbers have likely ballooned considerably over the past two years, the fact is, no one really knows for sure how many people actually fall into these categories. Assuming the workforce number is closer to 10 million, and Pew suggests that it is, that would be 6% of the U.S. workforce.
The national number is only one step in reliably considering impacts on a city like Omaha. Getting a reliable count of how many people in this category reside in the metro, and in what capacity they are employed, is a fool’s errand. It also must be said that not every immigrant lacks the proper documentation to reside in the U.S., nor is the issue limited to one ethnic group or country of origin.
At the national level, entities ranging from media to higher education and government to nonprofit organizations dealing in the immigration space have extrapolated the economic impacts of deportations on a massive scale, and the consensus picture is gloomy. The American Immigration Council released a report last fall to address the question. It stated mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product between 4.2% and 6.8%.
It also predicted a significant reduction in tax revenues, noting in 2022 alone, undocumented immigrant households paid $46.8 billion in federal taxes and $29.3 billion in state and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants also contributed $22.6 billion to Social Security and $5.7 billion to Medicare, the report stated.
The impact would likely deal a particularly crippling labor blow to select industry sectors. AIC estimated about 14% of construction workers were undocumented, representing roughly one-sixth of the homebuilding workforce. The Economist, meanwhile, reported nearly 40% of farmworkers were undocumented, and Pew estimated 9% of service workers were without proper work authorization.
Logic suggests the immediate impact of loss of a labor group that size includes slower, more expensive homebuilding and higher prices at the grocery store or a favorite restaurant, assumptions that are not without precedent. A study by the University of Utah, for instance, found housing prices for new homes jumped 18% after mass deportations between 2008 and 2013, while prices for existing housing stock climbed 10%.
A more surprising statistic is also being reported, that of the boomerang effect on U.S.-born workers. While it is suggested in some circles that freeing up jobs held by undocumented immigrants means greater employment opportunities for natives, history does not bear this out. A Brookings study released last year compared the number of immigrant and U.S.-born workers in the 15 most common occupations held by undocumented immigrants. It found unauthorized immigrants frequently take jobs that are low-paying, dangerous, and otherwise less attractive in greater numbers than both native workers and authorized immigrant workers.
This fact was further verified in a survey by the National Council of Agricultural Employers, taken during the pandemic, to see how many unemployed U.S.-born workers would take 100,000 seasonal farm jobs. It discovered less than 350 applied, lending some credence to the argument that many undocumented workers are filling jobs Americans are simply unwilling to do.
All of this takes a toll on employers, of course, and when an industry suffers, that trickles down to the front lines. In fact, as the Joint Economic Committee Democrats claimed in December, one of the hidden impacts of deportation is that for every 500,000 immigrants removed from the labor force, 44,000 jobs held by U.S.-born workers are lost due to subsequent hardships such as business closings, reduced hours, and more.
Narrowing the focus to Nebraska specifically, one must take into account the fact that the state is currently in one of the tightest labor markets in recent history, with only 39 workers for every 100 jobs, per the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The meat industry already offers some of the best wages going for unskilled workers, paying meat trimmers in packing plants nearly $18 an hour, almost $5 per hour above the state minimum. Yet, the industry remains desperate for workers and a sudden, wholesale loss of current employees to deportation would likely be devastating.
Speaking to NPR in January, Al Juhnke, executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association, said he’s fielded calls from producers demanding a labor solution by any means necessary.
“Al, I got a great idea,” Juhnke said, mimicking one member’s phone call. “Why don’t we invite any immigrants? Legal, illegal…I don’t care. Invite them to Nebraska because we have lots of openings out on our farm and we need help.”
Many business owners aren’t quite as blunt. In fact, many are loathe to talk about the issue on the record. Inquries by B2B to several business groups and individual companies alike went ignored or politely declined, something NPR reported experiencing as well, which suggests how emotionally and politically charged the issue has become. Mike Boyle, president of Kawasaki in Lincoln, was an exception, and wasn’t afraid to address the situation on the ground.
“We have three plants that I’m in charge of, one in Lincoln and two in Missouri,” he said. “The Lincoln plant, probably about 28% of our employees are of a recent immigrant group. Without the immigrant workforce, we could not generate the revenue that we do now because we’d have to turn away work and send that work to another Kawasaki manufacturing plant, probably somewhere out of the country. So the direct effect to Nebraska and to the U.S. would be a reduction of the GDP of our state.”
Boyle said the hit doesn’t stop there, given the many parts suppliers and other vendors the plant uses to assemble its products. He said Kawasaki has an exhaustive vetting and credentialing process to help ensure all direct employees are cleared to work in the United States—no small feat, given the diversity of his plant alone, where 17 languages are spoken. Yet, he said, the facility could be brought to its knees if vendors are not as thorough.
“There’s a multiplier effect in manufacturing,” he said. “We can’t produce everything internally that goes into our product. So, for example, a rail car that we build in Lincoln has 40,000 different part numbers on it. We can’t make all those, so we have a lot of manufacturing plants around the country making product for us and sending it to Lincoln.
“Those companies have some immigrant workforce that varies by location, but the same thing would happen to them. So, there’s a big multiplier effect that people don’t understand that really could trickle down and really limit who we are as a country and the growth of our economy.”
Boyle, who has decades of employment with the Japanese manufacturer, said there’s a growing amount of evidence that documented immigrants are also growing so fearful of immigration authorities, and it is taking a toll on local workforce. He relayed a story of a colleague whose company was facing an I-9 audit, which reviews worker documentation.
“This buddy of mine was a CEO of another manufacturing company here in Nebraska, and they had some issue come up,” he said. “There were people who…had some questions about their employment status who had to have a scheduled interview with the Department of Homeland Security.”
Boyle then noted, “Every one of those people did not go to the interview and never went back to work. This buddy of mine was saying he was sure that most of those people were qualified and had no problem, but the fear of going in for the interview really rocked that group.”
Back at Plaza Latina, Vega and Cervantes know well the fear that is paralyzing the community, keeping many from going to the doctor or the store, let alone to their jobs. Things are being made worse, they said, by rampant speculation and agitation that is further tightening nerves.
“The main concern is to stop the fear of people within the community, and that starts with people that are spreading fear and concern,” said Vega, who also founded, and remains president emeritus of, the Nebraska Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “People who are not Latino leaders, they don’t know the law, they don’t know the circumstances, but they create rallies, they create protests, and they’re ignorant of the situation.”
Vega continued, “And then, within our own community there’s people spreading false news on social media about, you know…‘immigration is coming down to your house, they’re gonna knock on the door,’ all that stuff. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is the one that has to be involved, engaged within the Hispanic community. We have to get people the real truth, the real answers to these problems.”
Vega said the everyday Omahan is unaware of how deeply the mass removal of undocumented immigrants of all ethnic backgrounds from the workforce would affect daily life.
“Definitely not,” he said. “I believe the community we are living in doesn’t understand the impact of the Latino community. They just live their lives like in normal days and they don’t see what we see, what we are experiencing right now. We are going through a phase that we have never seen before within the last 20 years.”
He went on to say, “Definitely the impact of the workforce will be felt, not only by businesses in South Omaha, but construction, restaurants, and some other businesses where Latinos work all over the city. You see Latinos on the farms, you see Latinos in the restaurants, you know, the impact of the Latino workforce is so, so great. But right now, most Anglo people don’t understand that.”
Visit nebraskalegislature.gov for more information on state immigration laws, and congress.gov for more information on national immigration laws. Information presented in this article is correct as of presstime.
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of B2B Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
